{"id":6167,"date":"2011-03-26T22:34:41","date_gmt":"2011-03-27T02:34:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/?p=6167"},"modified":"2011-03-27T10:30:25","modified_gmt":"2011-03-27T14:30:25","slug":"a-ham-i-am","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/26\/a-ham-i-am\/","title":{"rendered":"a ham i am!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just got my amateur radio license. If you&#8217;re unlucky enough to be on the 2m and 70cm bands around Toronto, you may just find me as <em>VA3PID<\/em>. The 3 is, of course, silent &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I guess that (so far unsuccessfully) futzing around with the small digital transceivers with Arduino made me look up some radio things, then I read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.metafilter.com\/100039\/No-ham-radio-for-old-men\">this article on MetaFilter<\/a>. It made me realize that unless new hams get on the air, the hobby will die, and the radio spectrum will be reallocated.<\/p>\n<p>Passing the test wasn&#8217;t that hard, but did take a bit of dedicated reading. No morse code is required for the Basic <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ic.gc.ca\/eic\/site\/smt-gst.nsf\/eng\/sf01862.html\">Amateur Radio Operator Certificate<\/a>, and if you get more than 80% in the multiple choice test, you can use the HF frequencies below 30 MHz. Since the pass mark is 70%, I thought it worth the extra effort.<\/p>\n<p>I slightly overbought on the study materials. I got:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.hamstudy.com\/\">HamStudy<\/a> Basic, plus the <a href=\"http:\/\/rac.ca\/\">RAC<\/a> Operating Manual (plus a year&#8217;s membership to the RAC)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.coaxpublications.ca\/\">Canadian Amateur Radio Basic Qualification Study Guide<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>While it&#8217;s possible to download the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ic.gc.ca\/eic\/site\/smt-gst.nsf\/eng\/sf01900.html\">question bank<\/a> from Industry Canada, or use the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ic.gc.ca\/eic\/site\/smt-gst.nsf\/eng\/h_sf05378.html\">quaint Windows-based examiner<\/a> program, I thought I&#8217;d work from a book. Both will likely do pretty well, but neither is perfect:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Both books need to work on their proof-reading.<\/li>\n<li>Mathematical symbols, superscripts and subscripts are easy to typeset these days. Don&#8217;t miss them out.<\/li>\n<li>They need to be fully metric, as trying to remember weird factors to convert fractions of a wavelength to feet is annoying. I&#8217;m a mid-career engineer, and I&#8217;ve never had to use anything but metric.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I passed the exam on Tuesday night, and had my callsign <a href=\"http:\/\/www.callsign.ca\/\">listed<\/a> by Friday. I have a cheap but adequate <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wouxun.us\/\">Wouxun<\/a> dual band HT. This should be fun.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_6180\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-6180\" style=\"width: 640px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6180\" title=\"ICP-2007\" src=\"http:\/\/scruss.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/ICP-2007.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" srcset=\"https:\/\/scruss.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/ICP-2007.png 640w, https:\/\/scruss.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/ICP-2007-160x120.png 160w, https:\/\/scruss.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/ICP-2007-320x240.png 320w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-6180\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Quaint, huh? Industry Canada&#39;s Windows-only examiner software<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just got my amateur radio license. If you&#8217;re unlucky enough to be on the 2m and 70cm bands around Toronto, you may just find me as VA3PID. The 3 is, of course, silent &#8230; I guess that (so far unsuccessfully) futzing around with the small digital transceivers with Arduino made me look up some [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[2284,2285,1215,2286],"class_list":["post-6167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-goatee-stroking-musing-or-something","tag-amateur","tag-ham","tag-radio","tag-va3pid"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQNZZ-1Bt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6167"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6175,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6167\/revisions\/6175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}